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Corporate Communications Go Under the Microscope

Analytics vendors Nasdaq and Wall Street Horizon each have launched new tools that aid institutional traders and investors in unlocking possible trading signals hiddened within corporate communications, company officials announced today, October 17.

......Wall Street Horizon, on the other hand, has delved into what company CEO Barry Star refers to as the unspoken “corporate body language,” with its launch of EventBreaks.

The new offering builds upon the vendor’s Enchilada platform, which provides users earnings and event data, and flags any changes covered companies make in earnings dates, the location their shareholder meetings, and public speaking engagements of their executives.

“There’s academic research that shows when a company moves its shareholder meeting more than 50 miles away from its headquarters that it is not a positive sign,” explained Star.

Wall Street Horizon has been developing EventBreaks for the past two years. Unlike Enchilada, which uses a “pull” delivery model, EventBreaks pushes its data to end users.

“We actually had to rebuild our whole backend to support it,” said Star.

The new backend enables EventBreak to track and record any changes made companies make regarding their meetings, calls, and presentations, which firms can use as an audit trail, he added. “Not only will EventBreaks tell you a shareholder meeting moved but that it moved yesterday at 2:22 p.m. EST from ‘X’ to ‘Y.'”

Wall Street Horizon has initially released EventBreaks as a low-latency feed for APIs.

“So when an earnings day changes or if the company changes the location of its shareholder meeting, users will know in milliseconds,” said Star. “They will get the information so they can trade on it. Or if the viewer is a market maker, they can adjust their spread.”

He expects support for desktop GUI is only a couple weeks away.

Regarding coverage, EventBreaks follows the same 6,000 public companies that Enchilada follows, according to Star. “There are 5,000 US companies and 1,000 companies outside of the US that are the constituents of every major global index,” he said.

Wall Street Horizon also plans to release near-term volatility reports, which will show users where to expect volatility over the next few days, also in the coming weeks.

The hard part is not creating a new view or report, according to Star. “The hard part is collecting all of the data and doing it in an accurate, timely, and comprehensive way.”